God so loved the cosmos, Jesus proclaims, that God came to heal, to save all things, through you and through all by the grace of the Spirit.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

What if the Israelites were wrong about the snakes?

A terrible plague of venomous serpents in the wilderness isn’t exactly an unexpected thing in that terrain. They’d been grousing about the bad food, saying that God and Moses led them out to die. So, they assumed God sent this plague as punishment.

They’re not the first or the last to experience tragedy and assume God was behind it. A year ago this week the world shut down for a global pandemic, and I’ve personally heard a number of people wonder if, or why, God sent COVID.

Israel’s logic falters with their healing. The attack of snakes could have been a natural event, or from God. But the healing absolutely could only come from God. Those who saw the bronze serpent God told Moses to make were healed. So, why would the same God both attack with snakes and provide healing from them?

The logic of God causing COVID also falters with the healing. Human brains, gifted with knowledge and imagination by God, have created multiple vaccines, and healing is happening, bringing hope for an end to this terrible period. Why would the same God plague the world with COVID and also inspire year-long efforts to end its effect on God’s beloved children?

We could argue both sides and never be sure we weren’t just idly speculating. If only God would come in person and answer the question definitively for us!

You know the Good News: God has actually done this.

If you struggle with what God is really about in the Bible or in the world or in your life, start with Jesus. If anyone knows what the Trinity is up to, it’s the person of the Trinity who took on human flesh among us, whom John’s Gospel says reveals to us God’s inner heart.

Today Jesus answers our very question unequivocally: the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing, not punishment. God, living as one of us, will be lifted up on a cross to love all creation back into God’s life, raised on a pole like Moses’ serpent, but for the healing of the whole cosmos, not just a small part.

God’s love is a cosmic love, Jesus literally says, sent not to judge the creation but to save it.

This is the full gift Jesus offers in these verses, if you can learn to see it.

There’s a very restricted way to read John 3:16, and many Christians for many years have read it that way. In that interpretation, God’s love for the cosmos is to save individual people from hell and give them heaven when they die. But you have to believe in Jesus to get it, that interpretation says.

But that only misses most of God’s immense gift in coming in Christ into the world. Now, certainly in God’s cosmic love there’s life with God after death – Jesus clearly promises that he goes to prepare a place for us in that life.

But in everything Jesus says about eternal life, it’s a lot bigger, and it’s right now. Eternal life is life in God’s new age, begun in Jesus already, a whole new reality of life in God’s love, right now. Jesus calls it “abundant” life, and he came for all to know and live it.

Today Jesus uses a word we translate “save,” which means save, and it also means “heal.” There is healing in God’s Son for this world, this life, Jesus says today. Paul knows that, too, in Ephesians today. “By grace you have been saved,” or, “by grace you have been healed,” he says, and makes it clear that’s for this life, too, not just after death. Because you are healed by grace, Paul says, for the good works you can do in this world, this life.

God’s gift needs to be this massive because the healing the world needs is massive.

Seeing God’s coming in Christ as only to get people into heaven after they die means missing the abundant life God desires you to know now. But it also means God’s creation and beloved creatures of all kinds continue to suffer in chaos and destruction, against God’s will. So much evil is done by people who only care about their own status with God, and don’t grasp the cosmic love of God Jesus proclaims today.

If saving and healing means forgiveness, as Paul declares today, and if God intends to heal and save all things, as Jesus says, forgiveness can’t be just removing punishment for your sin. Forgiveness transforms you, Paul says, to do the good works that God has planned for you and for all before any of us were born. It is, Jesus says, to live in the light, doing actions that are of God, not evil. As more and more are so transformed by God’s grace, this world itself begins to heal, oppression gets broken down, justice happens.

And if saving and healing means your heart is brought into God’s, as the Scriptures say, then yes, you find peace and hope yourself, your true place in the universe. But you also become someone who spreads God’s peace and hope through your life in this world.

If saving and healing are knowing God’s abundant life now, as Jesus says, then yes, you are made whole now, alive now. But you also are changed to someone who spreads God’s abundant life to the world through your life in this world.

God so loved the cosmos, my friends. God’s healing is meant to heal the whole thing.

Because the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing. Always. For everyone. Every thing.

We have this from Jesus himself, the face of the Trinity for us. God will clean up the mess of the world and heal the pain of the world’s creatures by transforming you, me, all, through God’s self-giving love lifted up on the cross, a love we are joined to in Christ’s resurrection life through the Holy Spirit. So that you, and I, and all, are “healed,” “saved,” our lives empowered to the same self-giving love Jesus showed God has for us, and in that self-giving love we, in turn, spread God’s love further into the cosmos God desperately wants to save. To heal. It’s a beautiful plan.

God is on the side of healing, and God wants the whole creation brought back into God’s life and justice and harmony. Trust that, Jesus says today. Trust that for you, for this life and for life after you die. And trust that as you are saved, healed, God will work through you for this healing eventually to reach all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

You are God’s temple, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit, who changes your heart to be a person living in God’s way for your sake and the sake of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 2:13-22; Exodus 20:1-17 (with ref. to 1 Corinthians 6:19)

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“What sign can you show us for doing this?” the temple leaders asked.

“Where do you get the authority to throw out our money changers and animal sellers?” It’s a fair question – they’re the authorities in the temple, not Jesus.

But this is the sign he gives them: “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That’s hugely confusing, to them and to us. Jesus’ actions had to do with the actual temple, made of stones and mortar. But then (and the disciples only realized this after his death and resurrection), Jesus shifted to speaking of his own body as the temple.

Jesus claimed to be the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s Spirit lived. That was his authority to declare how the stones-and-mortar temple for God’s worship (and the pilgrims being fleeced there) should be treated.

It also opened up the imagination of the early Church after they experienced Pentecost.

Twenty years after Easter and Pentecost, the apostle Paul revealed what the early Church learned from this.

“Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19), as if it was a well-known truth. Jesus referred to himself as God’s temple. Now Paul reminds the Christians at Corinth that they, too, are temples of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

And, Paul says, that means they’ll live different lives. Because they are Spirit-filled, they’ll glorify God with their bodies, their actions, their love, their faithfulness.

This is your baptismal promise, too: you are God’s temple, the Holy Spirit lives in you. We walk our journey of faith dripping wet from the waters of our baptism, reminded that we are not our own. You are not your own. God lives in you, and that will transform your heart, and your actions and life as you live bearing God’s Spirit in the world.

Because a heart filled with the Holy Spirit sees God’s way more deeply and broadly than before.

Both Martin Luther and Jesus taught us this as they considered the Ten Commandments, the covenant at Sinai we heard today.

Jesus first deepened them. You think you’ve kept the commandment “you shall not kill?” Jesus asks. Fine; but how are you handling your anger towards others, your calling them fools and idiots? That, too, violates this command. He isn’t making this commandment, or the others he deepened, harder. Jesus is saying that if your heart is filled with God’s Spirit you see that the original commandments only signal the outer boundaries of behavior. As you live into God’s way, they open up deeper and deeper ways to be faithful.

Luther broadened what Jesus deepened. In the Catechism, he taught every commandment as both forbidding things but also commanding positive things. He said “you shall not kill” also means helping and supporting neighbors in all their physical needs. So our concern for justice and ending oppression of our neighbors stems directly from our hearts shaped by the Spirit within, responding to this commandment, just as Jesus’ concern for the unjust practices of the temple came from the same place.

As you learn to listen to God’s voice moving in you, the pull of the Spirit, as you find quiet places in each day to be open to God’s presence in your life, you will be changed.

How you live and move and work in the world will be changed. It’s the sign to others that you are filled with God’s life, as it was with Jesus.

Of course, there’s a big challenge in this. If everyone runs around saying that God’s Spirit is in them and that’s the sign, the authority, for what they do, all sorts of evil can happen. (For example, just think of the many Christians who’ve used Jesus’ actions in the temple to justify violence and destruction in God’s name.)

That’s why God’s written Word is so important. God’s Word checks our behavior, makes sure we’re still on God’s path, refocuses us. Like these Ten Commandments, where we’re challenged by Jesus and Luther and the Spirit within us, to stay on the path of the life of God. Or Jesus’ summary of all the commandments, to love God and neighbor with sacrificial, vulnerable love, love as he has for us. That’s the corrective to using the Spirit as license to do whatever we want to whomever we want.

This is a lot to process, to take in.

We’re used to being the center of our own attention, having our needs, wants, and desires our focus. But Jesus is always calling you and me, sometimes gently, sometimes more strongly, to be centered on the love and life of God within us. To recognize that in our baptism we are in fact God’s temples, filled with God’s presence, and moving in the world.

Shaped by God’s Spirit living in you, you learn to see the world through God’s eyes, all the problems and unjust systems of our world that can and must be changed, just as Jesus saw the injustice in the temple practices. And with the Spirit’s grace, you can find your part in helping that change, no matter how old or how young you are.

That’s the abundant life Jesus came to invite you to know and live, and to invite all God’s children to know and live, for the sake of your healing and the healing of the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God promises everlasting love and graciousness, even knowing that we will betray such trust, because such cross-shaped love God has can save you and all creation.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Mark 8:31-38; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 (with references to other readings from the Hebrew Scriptures assigned to this year’s Lenten lectionary)

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Most of us have heard and perhaps even said that common aphorism. We don’t like to be tricked, let down, betrayed. It makes us feel foolish to have trusted. We know it happens, but this little saying tells us that if we let the same person do it more than once, we only have ourselves to blame for our humiliation.

So what does it mean that the Scriptures say that the Holy and Triune God not only keeps trusting after even two times of betrayal, rejection, abandonment, but into the millions and billions of times?

According to the Bible, God apparently has no limit to the amount of trust God puts in you, in me, in all people, and apparently no limit to the amount of times God will endure our inconstancy and failure, our betrayal and trickery.

This Lent we’ll see God’s relentless trust five times.

Each week we hear a covenant God makes with humans, a solemn promise to love and care for them, and each promise God makes is everlasting, forever. Last week it was God’s covenant with Noah; this week, a covenant with Abraham and Sarah; the next two weeks the covenant with God’s people at Sinai, and on the Fifth Sunday in Lent the new covenant God promises in Jeremiah 31.

You’d think that any recipient of such a covenant with God would gratefully live up to it, faithfully serve and follow God’s ways, joyfully try to be worthy of God’s trust.

You’d be wrong.

Every single covenant God makes with humans, they abandon, break, avoid, discard.

Noah hears God’s promise never to destroy the earth again, and this good man immediately gets drunk on new wine and exposes himself to his adult children. Abraham is repeatedly promised that he will receive land, many descendants through his wife Sarah, and will bless the world. But this good man twice passed his wife off as his sister when he felt threatened by a ruler, in hopes that the ruler would sleep with her without having Abraham killed as her husband.

We heard God’s covenant with David this past Advent season. David, Israel’s greatest king, is promised that his line will rule over Israel forever. Does David, in gratitude for such blessing, live a holy and pure life? No, he wickedly rapes his neighbor, gets her pregnant, and has her husband killed in battle.

The covenant with God’s people at Sinai is given by the God who just rescued them from centuries of slavery and now has graciously given them a law to guide their lives and keep them whole. So they faithfully and gratefully serve God, right? No, they complain about the food and drink in the desert, about God’s chosen leader, about God’s care for them. They worship a golden calf!

Seriously, doesn’t God ever get embarrassed at making covenants with unworthy people who betray and abandon them all the time?

Even the new covenant God promises through Jeremiah is one we trample.

Explicitly given because humans have broken every previous covenant God made with them, this one will be written on our hearts, a covenant of God’s forgiveness and forgetting. This is fulfilled in God’s coming in person in Jesus to write God’s love on our hearts and call us to love of God and neighbor.

Surely humanity would respond to such trust, such love, by welcoming God’s Son with open arms, repenting of our sinfulness, and following God’s ways?

Of course not. We humiliated God’s Son with a public torture and execution, and even more hurtfully, with betrayal and rejection by his close friends. We continue the humiliation to this day in our embarrassed unwillingness to follow his way of love.

But, you say, doesn’t Jesus finally say “Enough!” in today’s Gospel?

“If you’re ashamed of me and my words,” he says, “I’ll be ashamed of you when I come in the glory of God with all the angels.” Maybe Jesus – the face of the Triune God for us and the creation – reveals here that God has finally had enough of our untrustworthiness.

Maybe . . . if Jesus’ actions matched his words. They do not. Only weeks later Peter forgets the harsh rebuke he received today and abandons Jesus in his time of need. Whatever motivated Peter, fear or shame, his denial of Jesus – which Jesus himself witnessed – is precisely what Jesus says he will repay by being ashamed of anyone who does what Peter did.

But what Jesus actually does is go to the cross and bear, as God-with-us, all the humiliation humanity could dump on God, all the pain, rejection, betrayal. Christ brought God’s life into the deepest, degrading shame possible, and died. Then he rose from the dead, and that very day he sought out Peter and the others in forgiveness and love. Jesus wasn’t ashamed of them in retaliation. Jesus welcomed them back.

That’s the shameless love God has for you, for all people, and for the creation.

There’s no limit to the humiliation and rejection and betrayal God will endure for the sake of bringing all creation back into God’s life. Covenant after covenant God makes, covenant after covenant people break, and still God comes back for more.

Even for you. After all, in Baptism, God made one of God’s classic everlasting covenants of love and grace with you, with no point where God says you’ve failed one too many times, been untrustworthy once too often.

That’s the cross the Triune God is willing to bear again and again in hopes of bringing the creation back into harmony and justice and love, as God intended.

Because that kind of love empowers you and all it touches to love in the same way.

To take up the same cross. Call it self-giving, sacrificial, vulnerable, shameless, but as the reality that God’s love for you is such love sinks into you, it transforms you into someone who can love shamelessly, sacrificially, vulnerably, selflessly. And as more and more are so transformed, the whole creation starts healing.

Don’t think you can do it? Worried that you’ll let God down? You’re probably right. But God’s used to it. That’s why God always adds the words “forever” to God’s promises. So you know they are always yours, no matter what. And so you can realize that God’s shameless love is always transforming you into someone worthy of God’s everlasting trust.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The disciplines of Lent are the shaping of your whole life to live in the grace and love of God for you and share it with the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Ash Wednesday
Texts: Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

When was the last time you fasted and disfigured yourself so everyone would know what you were doing?

Or when did you last make your offering in a public way, announcing to all what you were giving? Do you have a problem with praying out loud on street corners so people know you are faithful?

These are the things Jesus critiques today, and it makes us wonder if they even apply to us. Isaiah’s criticism is easier to grasp: his people are fasting and putting on ashes as a sign of repentance, but they aren’t changing their lives. And they’re disappointed God isn’t impressed with their rituals.

But fasting, giving, and praying are disciplines that believers have found deep grace and help in practicing, and in which they’ve experienced the Holy Spirit’s power to transform them. And, every Ash Wednesday, the liturgy invites us to the “disciplines of Lent,” “self-examination and repentance, prayer and fasting, sacrificial giving and works of love.”

These disciplines may not always be things we hold in our hearts on a daily basis, whether in or out of Lent. But they can be a tremendous gift on our path of faith that the Holy Spirit can use to shape us as Christ, the calling we each received in our baptism. That’s Ash Wednesday’s invitation to you.

The discipline of fasting may be the most important one we could learn today.

Isaiah says fasting is far more than intentionally going without food for a time. The fast God seeks, Isaiah says, is nothing less than loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing and breaking the yokes that bind people in oppression, and freeing those people.

All these systemic problems in our culture and world that we’ve been awakened to see over the last number of years and most especially since the trauma this past year in Mount Olive’s city and neighborhood, all these, Isaiah says, must be broken apart and ended. That’s true fasting. And it’s a huge job. How can anything you or I do on Ash Wednesday, or ever, loose the bonds of injustice and break yokes of oppression?

Fortunately, in the next verse Isaiah makes it simpler. The fast God wants is for you to offer your bread to someone who’s hungry. Invite someone who has no house into your home. Provide clothing for someone who’s naked. Concrete, personal acts will show God where your heart is. And as each of us do such concrete, personal acts, the greater systems start to fall apart, too.

Most of us don’t have the spiritual habit of fasting to compare to Isaiah’s turn.

But even if many of us may not fast, a lot of us have gotten into the habit of giving up something for Lent. Use that as your entry into Isaiah, and exercise the discipline of self-examination and repentance here.

What if you quit thinking about giving up something for Lent and began to consider what you could give up for life that could draw you closer to your path as Christ?

No one is helped if I don’t eat chocolate for six weeks. But if I learn to let go of things that draw me from God, behaviors, privilege, assumptions, or even material things like food and possessions, many others could be blessed.

Because Isaiah says that true fasting, in addition to engaging personally with hunger and homelessness and poverty, is ultimately not hiding “from your own kin.” Fasting is seeing all people as your family – siblings, cousins, beloved – and your life as affecting all. When you let go of something you cling to, for the sake of someone else, you will be God’s blessing in ways you can’t imagine.

This might suggest a different way to practice the discipline of giving, too.

Mount Olive is a deeply giving congregation. Just in this past year we saw so many generously give food and time and energy over the months we had a food distribution in the parking lot, to help those who lost access to stores in the unrest. A number of times, word was sent out that we had a neighbor in need, and within a couple days supplies, furniture, household goods, all that was asked was given abundantly by you. This is good and a blessing, as is all that is given by Mount Olive’s people financially for God’s ministry here and around the world. This answers what Isaiah proclaims God is seeking.

But what if we imagined giving as also part of fasting? For example, what if fasting meant for you that you were willing to spend more money and more time to get what you need because it supported local businesses which paid local workers a just minimum wage, or because it avoided businesses that harmed their workers or the environment? If you “fasted” from convenience and cheap prices for the sake of the other? That both gives food and clothing and homes to those without and also starts breaking down the yokes of oppressive business practices and unjust economic realities.

What fasts might you be called to undertake, for the sake of God’s children, your siblings, in need?

The discipline of letting go, either for a time or permanently, can shape your life in profound ways. Your behaviors and attitudes, even prejudices and assumptions that seem written in, can be let go and changed. And such a discipline can be a blessing far beyond the confines of the Lenten season. It can continue past Easter, to the rest of your life. That’s the point of Lent, isn’t it? To learn patterns and disciplines of living our baptism that we can carry with us through the joy of Easter and into the life of God that flows in us always.

The mystery of these disciplines is they bring joy.

As daunting as the social problems are in our world, as much as we think we fail to faithfully deal with the systems of injustice and oppression, hunger and homelessness, being disciplined into becoming God’s blessing isn’t a burden. Isaiah says it’s a path filled with God’s light where you also become God’s light to others. Living these, you’re like a garden planted by a spring, and God’s Spirit pours into your life what you need to thrive and be filled, while blessing others through you.

And, Isaiah says, when we do these, we’ll even raise up ruined cities, repair breaches in our society, restore streets to live in. You and I are invited to renew our discipline today, that God’s Spirit might open that path of life for all God’s world.

And the great joy is, you get to be a part of God’s grace in bringing life and hope to this world, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen